Archive for January, 2010

While traveling in India, I rented a car with the driver for couple of days, the first thing the driver did was to reach the next gas station, took some amount as part-payment and filled the tank! The reason is that the he had only enough capital to buy gas to goto the next gas station. Thus he is not sitting idle just because he doesn’t have enough cash, he has a solution for shortage of capital. Thus, figure out a way to operate when the cash is tight. These days everything is available ala carte in the pay-as-you-go model. Look at the New work city to setup a Just-In-Time office, you could hire virtual assistants (look at Mechanical Turk in Amazon and whole bunch of service companies out there offering such a service).

That the economy in recession is probably the best bet to start doing whatever you are thinking you should do. This is the best time for so many reasons. All you need is ONE customer, if you are an entrepreneur you need one customer that you want to service, if you working you need one customer in your management team. You could concentrate on that ONE customer, though your margin is very small, once you satisfy this customer as the economy improves, with better referral you could get more customers. This bad economy not only will bring you less money, it will also help you get everything done cheaper thus as a percentage you will keep your profit & operating margin in a decent shape.

During a recession, the costs are low which reduces the “Barrier to Entry”, creating an entry point for an entrepreneur. There are so many services out there in the market that you can’t get going from the moment you decide to do. In the future, I’ll write more in detail about these services that could be used by the entrepreneur or any body to bring the cost structure down.

I’m planning to write anything and everything about topics, technologies (read IT), strategies that could be applied to SMBs in any part of the world. If you like me to research on anything or write on anything, please drop a line.